Humans Are Encountered

Cancer

"Adam?"

"Hmmm?" He turned to look at Zork'ak.

"What is cancer?"

Adam's mouth dropped open. "Wh-" He cleared his throat. "What?"

Zork'ak rolled on xer side. "You said while we were at the cliffs that your mother died of cancer. What is cancer?"

"Oh." Adam turned his face back up toward the moons. "It's this horrible illness." He swallowed hard, his voice sounding strangled. "It's an autoimmune disease, where the cells in your body can either be damage or altered, and those abnormal cells will replicate much faster than they should. Normally, the body will destroy a mutation like that, especially if it will cause harm to the body, but for some reason, cancer isn't destroyed. It will take over the normal cells. Sometimes you can find the cells early enough. Zork'ak watched as a tear slid down Adam's cheek. "You can find the tumors, the mass of destructive cells, before they start to hurt healthy tissue." Adam turned to look at Zork'ak. "Sometimes you get really sick, and it takes too long to realize that the cancer has taken over your whole body, and by then, there isn't a good chance. Doctors will still try, but you already see how much destruction there is, and there isn't a cure or anything for it." Adam pushed up into a seated position, covering his face.

"Adam," Zork'ak gently said, reaching out to touch his upper extremity. "I apologize for asking."

Adam lowered his hands, his face red and wet. "I never talk about it." Zork'ak opened xer mouth. "I'd like," Adam looked out across the terrain, his voice event quieter, "I need to talk about it." Zork'ak simply nodded.

"They do this treatment called radiation and chemotherapy. It targets the cells and the tissues around the cancerous cells and kills them. The only problem is that in addition to your own body destroying itself with the cancer, you now have this awful procedure to destroy more. We aren't able to just hit the cancerous cells, and so we take out everything within a radius.

"It made my mom sick, real sick. Hair falling out, no appetite, skin becoming really thin and pale kind of sick. She'd bruise if we'd touch her too hard; she started to lose her voice and then her strength. She turned into this person who was barely even reminiscent of who I remembered. Still, she was so strong through it all. She never complained when she lost her hair. She never said anything the nights she kept throwing up. She never once let us see her in pain. We knew, though. We could see her body falling apart."

The tears were flowing freely now, the words barely making it out of his throat. "It's really hard, though, to know what she was going through. And the more she tried and the doctors tried, there was nothing they could do with her. It was too late. The cancer had spread too far before she had let anyone know how sick she felt.

"I was mad for a long time that she didn't say anything. I was so angry that she hid it, and it had cost her her life. But I also couldn't be angry. I understood why she was being that way. She wanted to be strong and independent. I get that from her."

Zork'ak moved closer, wrapping an extremity around Adam's shoulders, and Adam leaned his head against Zork'ak. "I miss her. All the time. I was super close to my mom, and when she died-" A sob busted through his chest, this awful gasping sound. "When she died," a heavy breath, "it felt like I lost this huge part of me. She didn't deserve to die. There's so many times that I wish I had noticed, that I had known. I wish that the doctors had found out sooner, that the treatment had worked, that her body wouldn't have been so insistent to kill her. But no matter how much I wish, she'll never come back."

Zork'ak sat with Adam while he cried, thinking of the amount of Klyls they lost but had not mourned, about the way that humans cared so much. And as Zork'ak thought, xe realized that this pain could so easily struck xem as well if something were to happen to xer humans.

"Wishing is a cruel thing," Adam finally said after he scrubbed away the tears. "So is cancer."

"May I look at your tattoo again?"

Adam lifted his shirt, and Zork'ak peered at the small bunny and the ribbon tied around its neck. "Why a ribbon?"

"It's a symbol of cancer, of those who had it and fought, whether or not they lost that battle. The silver represents brain cancer." Zork'ak nodded, and Adam sighed loudly. "In the end, she's not in pain anymore, and as much as I miss her, I'm glad that she is no longer having to go through it."

Zork'ak wrapped both xer extremities around Adam, and Adam turned into the embrace. "Me, too," Zork'ak whispered, not only for Adam's mom but also for Adam.